ASSUMPTION GROUNDING THIS PAGE:We understand that racism is more than personal, that it is institutional and cultural, systemic and structural. See Racism 101 page for more information.

What is culture?

Culture refers to the knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.

Culture is the knowledge shared by a group of people.

Culture is communication, communication is culture.

A culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.

Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.

What is cultural racism?

Cultural racism is how the dominant culture is founded upon and then shapes norms, values,​beliefs and standards to advantage white people and oppress People of Color.

Cultural racism is how the dominant culture defines reality to advantage white people and oppress People of Color.

Cultural racism uses cultural differences toovertly and covertly assign value and normality towhite people and whiteness in order to rationalizethe unequal status and degrading treatment of​People and Communities of Color.

What is white supremacy culture?

White supremacy culture is the idea (ideology) that white people and the ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions of white people are superior to People of Color and their ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions.

White supremacy culture is an artificial, historically constructed culture which expresses, justifies and binds together the United States white supremacy system. It is the glue that binds together white-controlled institutions into systems and white-controlled systems into the global white supremacy system. ​[from Sharon Martinas and the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop]

White supremacy culture is reproduced by all the institutions of our society. In particular the media, the education system, western science (which played a major role in reinforcing the idea of race as a biological truth with the white race as the "ideal" top of the hierarchy), and the Christian church have played central roles in reproducing the idea of white supremacy (i.e. that white is "normal," "better," "smarter," "holy" in contrast to Black and other People and Communities of Color. For one example of the role of education in reproducing white supremacy culture, read below.

For a more in-depth discussion on "Why Black Lives Haven't Mattered: The Origins of Western Racism in Christian Hegemony," check out Paul Kivel's blog here.

For a more in-depth discussion on "The Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, and American Exceptionalism," check out Paul Kivel's blog here.

Question: Why do you call it white supremacy culture? Can we call it something else? ​Answer: We get this question a lot when people plan to use the article on white supremacy culture (see below) with their groups and organizations. They express a genuine concern that the term "white supremacy culture" will turn white people off, make us defensive and less willing to consider how this culture is reproduced. Part of this concern reflects how we've been taught by this culture to associate white supremacy with the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other people or groups that actively advocate a racist ideology and viewpoint. We believe it is important to use the term "white supremacy culture" because the norms, values, and beliefs that our culture reproduces act to reinforce the belief that "white" and people attached to "whiteness" are better, smarter, more beautiful, and more valuable than "black," or people and communities indigenous to this land, brought here for the purpose of enslavement, or immigrating here from Asia, India, or south of our border. We think it is important to name what is really happening, which is that we live in a culture that reproduces -- sometimes overtly and sometimes very subtly -- the idea that white is supreme. Those of us who live in this culture, including those of us who fight against racism, swim in this culture (like the fish in the illustration above) and unintentionally and unwittingly reproduce these norms, values, and beliefs. One way to address the genuine concern is to explain why we use the phrase white supremacy culture to get people to think about it. We are not white supremacists and we are swimming in and affected by a white supremacy culture.

﻿EXAMPLE: The desegregation of a school

1954

​The Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate means unequal and mandated desegregation of public schools. In the south, School Boards fired thousands of teachers and Black principals. As a result, thousands of white men and women, many less qualified and less credentialed, were hired in the newly integrated schools.

1960s

MY STORY . I grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in the 1950s and 60s. Chapel Hill is probably best known as the university town that gave us basketball legend Michael Jordan who went on to NBA fame with the Chicago Bulls. I grew up during the last decade of Jim Crow segregation and the burgeoning of the Civil Rights movement. My parents were active in that movement, taking me with them on marches and sit-ins.

I attended an all-white elementary school and I had one African-American classmate in junior high (the equivalent of middle school). By the time I got to high school in the late 1960s, the School Board decided to "integrate" the schools. This meant bringing the predominantly white student body from Chapel Hill High School and the all-Black student body from Lincoln High School together in a new school building on the edge of town.

This new high school was called Chapel Hill High School. The principal, Ms. Marshbanks, had been the principal at Chapel Hill High. The assistant principal, Mr. McDougle, had been the principal at Lincoln. All of my teachers were white because all the teachers in the new school (with the exception of typing and driver's ed) were white. The student council was all white. The cheerleading squad was all white. The boys' basketball team had one Black player, the football team had 10 Black players. The name of the teams were brought over from the white school. If you look at the yearbook from that time, produced by an all-white yearbook staff, you only see Students of Color when you get to the back pages showing the class photos. Walter Jones, one of my African-American classmates, recalls walking down the hall and literally seeing the trophies from Lincoln, a school that had earned back-to-back all-state sports records, in the trash.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: What were the assumptions driving the Chapel Hill School Board as they "integrated" the new high school? Who had value? Why? What was the cost of "integration" to the Students of Color? What was the cost to the white students? How are the assumptions driving "integration" in the 1960s still alive in schools today?

This is a picture of me during my high school days.

Culture is powerful precisely because it is so present and at the same time so very difficult to name or identify. The characteristics listed below are damaging because they are used as norms and standards without being pro-actively named or chosen by the group and because they promote white supremacy thinking and behavior. We all live in a white supremacy culture, so these characteristics show up in the attitudes and behaviors of all of us – white people and People of Color. Therefore, the attitudes and behaviors described here can show up in any group or organization, whether it is white-led or predominantly white or People of Color-led or predominantly People of Color. For a more detailed description of these characteristics and their antidotes, click here or download the file below.

The list of white supremacy characteristics includes: perfectionism, a sense of urgency, defensiveness, valuing quantity over quality, worship of the written word, belief in only one right way, paternalism, either/or thinking, power hoarding, fear of open conflict, individualism, belief that I'm the only one (who can do this 'right'), the belief that progress is bigger and more, a belief in objectivity, and claiming a right to comfort.

White Supremacy Culture

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: Which of these characteristics are at play in your life? In the life of your organization or community? How do they stand in the way of racial justice? What can you and your community do to shift the belief(s) and behavior(s) to ones that support racial justice?

Other Resources

For an article on white fragility (which functions to preserve white supremacy) and "why it's so hard to talk to white people about racism," clickhere.